The Brutal Ageism of Tech

Here's the thing, the software-is-eating-the-world explosion really took off in the early 90's (or at least that's when myself and a bunch of friends I knew got into it). All the people that got into writing software back then are aging and most that I know aren't planning to stop. I myself am on the doorstep of my 36th birthday. For those of us that have slogged it out for multiple decades now aren't simply going to go sit at home and wish we were 20 again. The sheer number of aging engineers will cause this problem to reach a breaking point. Those of us that have been instilled with the "disrupt the establishment" ethos in the 90's and 2000's will find a new industry to disrupt...our own.

If I were an SV employment lawyer, I'd be making a copy of the "careers" page referenced in that article. I suspect that would look very very bad as Exhibit A in an age discrimination case against the company in general. Sure, there could be other interpretations (maybe) but...

Some companies are addicted to long hours & naive employees.

It's also a natural progression of an engineer to start off as an employee & then take an independent identity. So it's common to see older engineers become consultants & business owners; who then hire the younger, cheaper, more impressionable employees.

The odd thing is hiring older workers is generally a great idea. From an organisational perspective programming teams don't scale vary well so hiring less skilled people is generally a terrible long term strategy. Personally, I have worked with a few hundred programmers and I can only name 3 that where competent before 30.

Outside the valley you find a plenty of really competent programmers mostly in there late 40's along with a few people that are nearing retirement age and while often gruff tend to blow your minds. As in "we stopped testing his code years ago." Or just calling someone team _. As in you could get 15-30 people working on a project or if your lucky Bob.

And that's really the thing a lot of these articles miss. While 20-somethings are making software to automate burrito delivery to other 20-somethings with drones in San Francisco, there's a whole world full of developers solving real problems each day. But it's hard to convince the rest of the world that there's more to the software industry than the Bay Area echo chamber.

Edit: I know not all of Silicon Valley is doing pointless startups.